The forgetfulness of today

When was the last time you heard Gandhi’s voice? How many of the several stirring speeches made by Jawaharlal Nehru can we hear in our heads? I can remember the first line of the ‘Long Years Ago, we made a tryst with destiny’ as spoken by him but nothing else. Not even the deeply moving ‘the light has gone out and there is darkness everywhere’ speech delivered on Gandhi’s demise. And when it comes to the other leaders of the freedom struggle, there is a startling absence of memory, visual or otherwise. Had Richard Attenborough not made Gandhi, we would have virtually no visual reference of person we refer to as the Father of the Nation. Even now, when we see the real Gandhi in pictures he looks like a shriveled version of how he ought to be, thanks to the somewhat sturdier bearing of Ben Kingsley.

To most, the freedom struggle too is a chapter in a book and a receding lecture received from one’s elders. One could explain this by arguing that the India of today has no time for stories of the sacrifice made by previous generations. No one really wants to be reminded about being colonized and the trauma of Partition. The India narrative of today has its own triumphs and insecurities and being reminded of a difficult past is not a priority.

Even if this were true, even if we had no time for memories deemed painful, surely we would celebrate our moments of triumph? The truth is that eventhe moment when the yearnings of a fragile young nation turned into reality, when a colonized people won the right to living lives on their own terms, when the idea of India stopped being an idealized abstraction is strangely undocumented in popular imagination.

As far as we are concerned the strongest visual memory of India achieving anything noteworthy in the past is the 1983 World Cup win. Not 1947 and strangely not even 1971 when Pakistan, the dreaded arch enemy was humbled and actually surrendered. We have this on tape; a subdued Gen AAK Niazi signing the surrender document in front of a gracious Gen JS Aurora but we rarely get to see this footage. We endlessly replay the victory of an event that occurred twenty five years ago where we won a tournament in a game played by eight countries in the world and not something that happened a mere twelve years earlier when we won such a famous victory.

The absence of memory is not confined to lofty nationalistic sentiments alone. Even cricket, our contemporary national religion and the site of complex statistical memory is increasingly devoid of the references to the past. The earlier generation grew up in a time when we heard stories about the alleged fierceness of Amar Singh & Nissar, (that somehow never translated into any performance),the willowy magnificence of the blades of Merchant & Manjrekar and the guile of Subhash Gupte. The past was an intrinsic part of the fabric of the present; one lived in continuous time.

The one place where the past is aggressively exhumed is when it comes to Bollywood, particularly its classic melodies. Channel after channel devotes weekend programming to paying tribute to a golden era that is irredeemably behind us. Perhaps because here the past alive in our heads, and gives us something that present simply cannot. It is a user’s view of memory, but at least it does allow for nostalgia to be alive in its original form.

Otherwise, today, it is as if only the present exists. The past when consumed, is in its renovated version; it is re-presented to us in a form that is consumable today. Anything in black & white, anything that is grainy, any voice or sound that has not been re-mastered is rejected. We are happy to use the past as material for the present as seen in films as diverse as Om Shanti Om, Rang De Basanti and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, which is particularly noteworthy because it essentially rewrites the past in order to render it of contemporary interest. There is a glut of re-makes that seeks to improve upon the past, often with disastrous consequences. But the idea of ‘the past as it was’ seems to be of little interest to us. As consumers, the past that we readily consume is that which is of use to us.

Part of the reason lies in the way we have sought to preserve memories. Statues and monuments of a ritualistic nature serve to emphasise the datedness of the past. Time is cruel to statues and museums, and turns them stiff with rigor-mortis. We need new devices where memory lives, breathes and performs. In the absence of these new ‘living museums’ we will either forget or create a new past that is nothing but a mirror reflection of ourselves projected back in time.

There is much to learn from the past, particularly in the area of political conduct. Letters exchanged between Gandhi & Nehru and rivals Nehru & Patel among others, resonate with a deep desire to do the right thing and carry the unmistakable ring of mutual respect and admiration that they shared with each other, their differences notwithstanding. They tell a story that is profoundly inspirational for today. We need to find a way to make these memories live again. We need to sometimes hear Gandhi in our head.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional. He says he has strayed into writing entirely by accident, and for this he is "grateful". "City City Bang Bang" looks at contemporary Indian society from an everyday vantage point. It covers issues big and small, tends where possible to avoid judgmental positions, and tries instead to understand what makes things the way they are. The desire to look at things with innocent doubt helps in the emergence of fresh perspectives and hopefully, of clarity of a new kind.

Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional. He says he has strayed into writing entirely by accident, and for this he is "grateful". "City City Bang Bang" l. . .